Cyrano de Bergerac

Is it a tragedy, is it a comedy?

Stretched between these two extremes, the play in which Cyrano is the hero is like a flame that shoots across the theatrical sky- love that strikes like lightning. A classic love story, of course, between the main characters. First, and above all, love at first sight between the play and the public.

From the start, the work is considered one of the best in the genre. Even though the play is of the romantic school, it became a classic practically overnight. Just why is it that Cyrano is a play that everybody immediately wants to identify themselves with ? Perhaps because this pyrotechnical verbal display where dramatic poetry consumes itself is a sort of fully assumed self portrait- even including caricatures- of what is commonly known as the “French spirit”. To portray it, Rostand creates a superb monster, a chimera : a lover with great style behind a commedia dell'arte mask, who carries in his chromosomes some genes from Matamore, Quasimodo, Alceste and the Man who Laughed. He dreams in his own way, the exemplary and baroque biography of a martyr of liveliness, of gallantry and “national” verve, a master of that great game, the loser wins and takes all, and even more fascinating because all of these qualities are the result of a sublime artistic wish. Signing his name with the tip of his sword and his feather, born from excess, he is always “too much” Cyrano, the funniest, incomparably brave. Always on stage, and always hoping for that moment where he will be able to appear as he truly is, declare what is forbidden to him and upon casting away the mask of ugliness, know at last the real face that he imagines he has. It is as if this over the top man only lived on credit from his own nothingness, and on which he pays interest with beautiful gestures and well spoken words, intense, sparkling, spiritual to the last, released from the weight of an existence that knows that it is so empty and so fragile. Words brought together that absolutely must have a stage to resurrect the brave Don Giovanni through his acts of bravura... Actor and author of his own play, Cyrano is perhaps one of the few original names of theatre.